Hi. I am in the planning stages of a website that will feature original articles, news feeds, forums, galleries, etc. I plan on having a video section like many of the video websites out there, break.com, etc. so the members can upload/link their videos. It's a niche site and the videos will be related to the niche. Each member will have his own page where their videos can be found and the videos will also be available via a video section where they can be organized by popularity, rating etc. My question relates to the ROI on streaming videos. I'm trying to decide if I should just offer the ability to link to videos hosted by popular video hosting sites like YouTube or if I should host and stream the videos myself on our server. I'd prefer to give people the convenience of uploading their videos directly to our server and have our watermark automatically placed so they wouldn't have to leave the site. Can anyone offer any advice on what the pros and cons of either option might be? How would I determine what the break even point or ROI on streaming video is? The site's revenue will be completely ad-based. Thanks for the help.
Its better to host the video at your own server coz embedded videos from other site is too troublesome for user. And you should allow your user to download the videos from your site so that they can spread the videos that contain your site link to their friend. The most important part is your server can handle the mass query and able to stream the videos at fastest speed to viewer.